The Origin of Things
Every time we get together, my brothers and I tend to get hung up on a word or phrase; arguing over the origin and proper use or, more likely, misuse. With today’s smartphones, we can quickly ping the interwebs for an answer usually leading to more chin scratching and the muttering of phrases such as: “Ah yes. That makes sense” or “Really? It sounds more Russian than French”. The funny things is that we have no idea what we are talking about, but we like to pretend. There have been many ……discussions over the years: rife; lineagey; remote; etc. Tonight the word that caught our interest was smithereens. For some twisted reason the first thing I thought of was Mr. Smithers (I already said we didn’t know what we were talking about). A quick search led us to a page explaining that Smithereens was Irish in origin and could be based on an old Gaelic word ‘Smiodar’ meaning fragments. The article had a second origin that I actually prefer; “’smithereens’ … refers to the shards of